The present invention relates to telephony, and in particular to an audio conferencing platform.
Audio conferencing platforms are well known. For example, see U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,483,588 and 5,495,522. Audio conferencing platforms allow conference participants to easily schedule and conduct audio conferences with a large number of users. In addition, audio conference platforms are generally capable of simultaneously supporting many conferences.
Due to the widespread popularity of the World Wide Web, Internet traffic is at an all time high and rapidly increasing. In addition, the move towards IP communications is gathering momentum. Users are currently using the Internet as a mechanism for retrieving streamed audio and video media streams.
There is a need for an audio conferencing system that can stream its summed conference audio onto the Internet in real-time. This will allow a user to listen to an audio conference supported by the audio conferencing system, over the Internet.